Peace process in turmoil after police raid Stormont

The Northern Ireland peace process was in turmoil yesterday after police raided Sinn Fein's Stormont offices and arrested a senior party official as part of swoop on an IRA spy ring.

Another man, a former government employee, whom detectives were trailing for a year, is being questioned about collecting information for the IRA about secretary of state John Reid and security minister Jane Kennedy.

Tony Blair will face unionist demands for him to kick republicans out of the power-sharing administration for breaking their ceasefire, and the political furore has the potential to wreck the Good Friday Agreement.

More than 200 officers, including special branch, CID and uniformed police officers, burst into a number of republicans' homes in north and west Belfast at 5am, where they seized documents and computer disks and arrested three men and a woman.

One of those detained was Denis Donaldson, a former IRA prisoner and hunger striker who was in the Maze jail with Bobby Sands in 1980. Mr Donaldson is now Sinn Fein's head of administration at the east Belfast-based assembly.

A few hours later, seven police Land Rovers arrived at Parliament Buildings and politicians looked on aghast as about 30 officers rushed upstairs and burst into Mr Donaldson's office, from which they took two computer disks.

Sinn Fein condemned the raids as a politically motivated attack on their party and the peace process. But the drama fed unionists' worst fears that republicans are publicly talking peace while secretly plotting violence.

Security sources indicated the investigation centred not on activity at Stormont but at the nearby Castle Buildings, which house the offices of Mr Reid and Ms Kennedy, and where the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated four years ago.

The focus is a former messenger at Castle Buildings, who handled all external and internal mail, including letters from Downing Street. He worked there for six months last year, but left suddenly in September following an internal inquiry. Police have had him under surveillance ever since, and he was one of the four arrested in west Belfast yesterday. A security source said that although this man was not privy to top-secret intelligence - which passed between Downing Street and Belfast on a separate electronic system - he had access to some highly sensitive correspondence.

The source said yesterday's raids were not connected to the March 17 robbery at special branch offices in Castlereagh, for which police blame the IRA, although no one has yet been charged. But he said detectives would try to establish if the same network was behind both operations.

David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader and Northern Ireland first minister, said yesterday's events vindicated his pledge a fortnight ago to pull out of power sharing with Sinn Fein by January 18 if republicans could not prove they had forsaken violence.

"It's in the same league as Castlereagh, it's in the same style as Castlereagh. It's probably been carried out by the same people," he said.

Mr Trimble said it was now up to Mr Reid and Mr Blair to fulfil the promise they made in July to act if it became obvious that the IRA had broken their ceasefire. He would meet the prime minister next week.

The latest developments - compounded by the start of legal proceedings against three suspected IRA terrorists accused of helping train Marxist rebels in Colombia; the Castlereagh case; and murders, shootings and beatings, will add fuel to the arguments of unionist hardliners.

The Ulster Unionist Lagan Valley MP Jeffrey Donaldson said the raids marked the "final nail in the coffin of Sinn Fein's participation in the government of Northern Ireland".

Peter Robinson, the east Belfast Democratic Unionist MP, said: "The fact that such a raid has taken place must drive a coach and horses through protestations that Sinn Fein is committed to exclusively peaceful means."

"This is a politically inspired ricochet into the middle of a highly volatile situation. It is an attack on Sinn Fein and the process of change and it is damaging to everybody involved in the peace process," she said.

Republicans accused the police of heavy-handed tactics, and claimed the papers seized dealt with policing, human rights and justice issues. But Hugh Orde, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, would have been well aware of the consequences of such an operation.

Last night John Reid pledged that the investigation would be pursued to its conclusion, regardless of the political consequences.

He said he had been aware of the police investigation for some time, but had not personally authorised the raids. Any decision on possible sanctions against Sinn Fein would have to await the end of the police inquiry and any judicial proceedings, he added.